Across the country, some families say they have gone from packing lunches and checking homework to monitoring lesson plans and organizing political campaigns — not because they wanted a new hobby, but because they believe their children are encountering antisemitism in public school.

That sense of urgency, parents argue, intensified after Oct. 7, when many classrooms began discussing the Israel-Hamas war and related politics. What they describe is not simply disagreement over foreign policy, but what they see as misinformation and hostile rhetoric aimed at Jewish students, often framed as activism. In their view, the result has been a school climate that feels increasingly unsafe.

One recent example of how parents say the problem shows up in day-to-day instruction appears in a new Anti-Defamation League online resource designed to help families spot and challenge bias in K-12 materials. The ADL toolkit, published recently, aims to help parents “decode and disrupt” problematic messages in their children’s curriculum.

But for at least one parent advocate, the appearance of that guidance came with frustration rather than comfort. The toolkit points to a well-known piece of classroom media: a 2017 Vox video titled “The Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Brief, Simple History.” The author of this account says a friend’s daughter was assigned the same video in seventh grade in 2018, and that immediately afterward a student yelled, “F— Israel”.

According to the parent, local Jewish leaders — including the ADL — told the family at the time that the school district had addressed the issue. Yet the parent says the video surfaced again two years later in the same student’s ninth grade social studies course, raising doubts that the district’s response had been lasting.

Parents who have become involved in these fights argue that such incidents were not isolated, even before Oct. 7, but were treated that way — handled quietly, case by case, or sometimes not responded to at all. They contend that inconsistent oversight allowed what they call a deeper, more entrenched problem to take root across K-12 systems.

In February 2024, students at El Camino Real Charter High School in Woodland Hills, California, walked out to protest antisemitic incidents, underscoring how these disputes can spill beyond curriculum reviews into public demonstrations and broader community conflict.

Some parents also cite examples they say reflect political messaging in schools. Fox News Digital reported it obtained a photo of a pro-Hamas slogan written on a teacher’s blackboard at Susan E. Wagner High School: “Free Palestine. From the River to the Sea”.

As they mobilize, parent organizers say they have found themselves doing work typically associated with established advocacy organizations: forming local groups, building networks, creating nonprofits and trying to influence school board races. Yet they describe a movement that is often stretched thin, lacking money, legal support and communications capacity.

They also argue that the institutional Jewish community has sometimes been slow to respond, particularly in places where leaders are not closely connected to local schools or are wary of stepping into political battles. In the parents’ telling, the consequences are practical: limited relationships with superintendents and principals, insufficient familiarity with district-level power dynamics, and reluctance to acknowledge what they see as an ideological shift inside education systems.

The author — Sharon Ceresnie Sorkin, a parent in Ann Arbor, Michigan, co-founder of Focus on Education A2 and director of community engagement at the North American Values Institute — says parents need more than late-arriving advice. She argues the established community should first listen to those already confronting the issue and then deploy resources to expand the strategies that appear to be effective.

Sorkin describes parents as underfunded and worn down, while facing pushback not only from critics but, at times, from supposed allies who, she writes, are “pouring water back in the boats we’ve just baled water from.” She contends that parents need financial support, organizational infrastructure and access to expertise — including media connections to shape public understanding and attorneys to pursue legal options.

At the same time, she points to organizations she considers models for parent-centered action, including the Bay Area Center to Counter Antisemitism and the North American Values Institute, known as NAVI. Through NAVI, she says, parents are supported by listening sessions and practical guidance, including a document titled When the Classroom Turns Hostile.

Her core argument is that families did not volunteer for activism but were compelled into it when they believed their children were singled out. The moment, she says, demands urgency and genuine partnership — with parents treated not as a peripheral voice in education debates, but as a central part of any effort to confront antisemitism in schools.